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Empowerment as Predictor of Organizational Role
Stress among Bank and Insurance Personnel
Ajai Pratap Singh*
Abstract
This study examines the impact of empowerment on organisational role
stress. Based on a sample size of 120, the results depicted empowerment as
being negatively and significantly related with organisational role stress. The
findings have implications for managing and regulating organisational role
stress.
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*Senior Lecturer , Dept. of Applied Psychology, VBS Purvanchal University
Jaunpur,UP India Email- [email protected]
Introduction
Modern life is full of stress. As organizations become more complex, the
potential for stress increases. Urbanization, industrialization and increase in
scale of operations are some of the reasons for rising stress. Stress is an
inevitable consequence of socioeconomic complexity and, to some extent, its
stimulant as well. People experience stress, as they can no longer have
complete control over what happens in their lives. Being no escape from
stress in modem life, we need to find ways of using stress productively, and
reducing dysfunctional stress. In recent years, the concept of empowerment
has become a buzzword in management circles and gained prominence as an
individual level initiative to counter stress. Its origins are in issues raised in
the era of employee involvement symbolized by participative management,
managerial practices such as employee self management, and sharing power
and responsibility with team members.
Employee Empowerment
One of the most frequently referenced definitions of employee
empowerment is that offered by Conger and Kanungo (1988). They define
empowerment as a process of enhancing feelings of self-efficacy among
organizational members through the identification of conditions that foster
powerlessness, and through their removal by both formal organizational
practices and informal techniques of proving efficacy information. This
definition implies strengthening the effort-to-performance expectancy or
increasing employee feeling of self-efficacy. According to Conger and
Kanungo, the effect of empowerment is the initiation and persistence of
behavior by empowered employees to accomplish task objectives. This
definition is rooted in management theory of power and authority delegation
that gives an employee the right to control and use organizational resources
to bring about desired organizational outcomes.
Thomas and Velthouse (1990), however, argued that the concept of
empowerment is much more complex and could not be fully explained in a
one dimensional construct such as self-efficacy. They therefore define
empowerment as an intrinsic task motivation that manifests itself in four
cognitions (meaningfulness, competence, impact and choice or self-
determination), reflecting an individual’s orientation to his or her work roles.
By intrinsic task motivation, they mean, a positively valued experiences that
an individual derives directly from a task that produces motivation and
satisfaction.
Meaningfulness is the value of the task goal or purpose in relation to the
individual’s own ideals or standards, and competence is the degree to which
a person can perform task activities skillfully. Impact, on the other hand, is
the degree to which behavior is seen as making a difference in terms of
accomplishing the purpose of the task, while choice or self-determination is
the causal responsibility for a person’s actions. It reflects independence in
the initiation and continuation of work behavior and processes (Deci,
Connell, and Ryan, 1989).
Employee empowerment literature identifies contextual factors and
strategies that promote and support empowerment. For example, Burke
(1986) suggests that a way to empower employees is to express confidence
in them together with establishing realistic high performance expectations
for them. Block (1987) adds the creation of opportunities for employees to
participate in decision making, and giving employees
autonomy from bureaucratic constraints as empowerment strategies.
Comparatively, Benis and Nanus (1985) suggest the setting of performance
objectives for employees that are challenging and inspiring. Also, Oldham
(1976), Kanter (1979), Strauss (1977), Hackman and Oldham (1975) suggest
performance-based reward systems and enriched jobs that provide autonomy
and control, task identity, opportunities for career advancement and task
meaningfulness as ways to empower employees. At the organizational level,
however, McClelland (1975) and House (1988) suggest that empowerment
could be achieved through employee selection and training programs
designed to provide required technical skills together with a culture which
encourages self-determination and collaboration instead of competition.
A practical and process oriented definition of empowerment was offered by
Bowen and Lawler (1992). They define employee empowerment as sharing
with front-line employees, information about an organization’s performance,
information about rewards based on the organization’s performance,
knowledge that enables employees to understand and contribute to
organizational performance, and giving employees the power to make
decisions that influence organizational direction and performance.
Role Stress Role stress occurs in employee jobs that involve direct customer contact
whether in the context of a face-to-face or a telephone service encounter
(Babin & Boles, 1996; Brown & Peterson, 1993; Kahn, Wolfe, Quinn,
Snoek, & Rosenthal, 1964) has identified role conflict and role ambiguity as
the two key components of role stress. Role conflict has been defined as “the
simultaneous occurrence of two (or more) sets of pressures such that
compliance with one would make more difficult compliance with the other”
(Kahn et al., 1964, p. 19). For personnel, expectations of the organization,
the supervisor or team leaders stressing operational efficiency may clash
with the demands of customers who want problem resolution or satisfaction.
In many instances supervisors focus on technology to speed up the process
of customer interaction, not realizing that a critical element of call center
employee performance is the level of satisfaction based on meeting customer
expectations. Furthermore, modern organisations are typically a setting in
which electronic performance monitoring takes place, and recent empirical
work has shown that this is a major factor of job stress (Aiello & Kolb,
1995; Silverman & Smith, 1995). Role ambiguity occurs when a person does
not have access to sufficient information to perform his or her role as a
service employee adequately (Walker, Churchill, & Ford, 1975). Role
ambiguity may result when the employee is uncertain about the supervisory
expectations or when they do not know how their performance will be
evaluated.
The antecedents of role stress (role ambiguity and role conflict) are
clearly established in the literature. Empowerment, competence, and
leadership have been found to affect role stress. Empirical research on the
relationship between empowerment and role stress is both scarce and mixed
(Bowen and Lawler 1995). Empirical work has established a negative
relationship between empowerment and role stress (ambiguity and conflict).
The greater the perceived empowerment the less the role stress. Two
dimensions of empowerment have been identified: (1) competence and (2)
authority (Chiles & Zorn, 1995; Conger & Kanungo, 1988; Spreitzer, 1995).
Competence is an employee’s belief in the capability to perform job related
activities with skill, whereas authority reflects autonomy in the initiation and
continuation of work behavior and processes. Employees that experience a
work-specific sense of competence are more likely to assume an active
orientation with regard to their work and hence will experience lower levels
of role stress (Gist & Mitchell, 1992). Autonomous employees feel that they
have the responsibility and the power to make things happen. Many
operational aspects of a modern organization actually create pressures that
reduce the probability of employees to feel empowered. In many industries
there has been a strong emphasis on the role that information technology
plays in guiding employees through customer interactions, by selecting the
appropriate path for them to follow through so-called “screen pops”
containing communication scripts. This closely resembles the production
line approach to service delivery that has been effectively used in the fast-
food business (Bowen & Lawler, 1995).
However, in many organizations, employees have to deal with unusual and
unexpected situations in which the strong emphasis on rules and regulations
of the scripted approach lacks the required flexibility and discretionary
behavior needed to satisfy customers. The rigid focus on technology may
lead to role stress (Schaufeli, Keijsers, & Miranda, 1995). Empowered
employees are free to fine-tune service regulations contained in scripts in
order to meet or exceed customer expectations. Hartline and Ferrell (1996)
report a direct positive relationship between empowerment (operationalized
as tolerance of freedom) and role conflict and report an indirect positive
effect of empowerment on role ambiguity. This is explained by the fact that
empowerment may increase uncertainty because there are fewer standards or
procedures that can be used as guidelines by employees.
Objectives
This study has been designed to investigate the relationships as well as
the contribution of empowerment dimensions on organisational role
stress in the Indian context. It has the following objectives:
1. To investigate the relationships between empowerment and
organisational role stress.
2. To find out the contribution/impact of empowerment on organisational
role stress.
Hypotheses
It tests the following hypotheses:
1. There will be significant relationships between empowerment
dimensions and organisational role stress.
2. The empowerment dimensions will significantly contribute to
organisational role stress.
Method Sample A sample of 120 employees (male = 112, female = 8) were selected by
purposive sampling technique from 4 banks and 5 insurance companies
(both private and public) in Utter Pradesh, India. The mean age of the
participants was 38.31 years with a standard deviation of 10.41 ranging from
19 to 56 years. The average tenure of participants in their job positions was
12.99 years ranging from 1 to 31 years.
Tools
ORGANIZATIONAL ROLE STRESS SCALE (ORS)
The organizational role stress scale (ORS) used was developed by Pareek
(1997). The scale has a total of fifty items divided into ten dimensions and a
total score. The ten dimensions of the ORS are: self role distance, inter- role
distance, role stagnation, role isolation, role ambiguity, role expectation
conflict, role overload, role erosion, resource inadequacy and personal
inadequacy. It has a test-retest reliability coefficient of 0.73(Sen, 1981).
Empowerment Scale
Empowerment was assessed using the instrument developed by Spreitzer
(1995). Spreitzer’s measure, comprising four 3-item subscales, taps the em-
powerment dimensions of meaning, perceived competence, self-
determination and impact by asking respondents to indicate their degree of
agreement, or disagreement, with 12 Likert-type statements. In the present
study responses were recorded on a seven-point scale, ranging from
“strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”. Alpha for a combined scale was .72
in an industrial sample and .62 in an insurance sample.
Results and Discussion
The major thrust of the present investigation was to study the relationship
between empowerment and organizational role stress. Correlation analysis
was used to measure the linear relationship between dependent and
independent variables. Multiple regression analysis was used examine the
relative impact of empowerment dimensions on organizational role stress.
Table:1 Correlation between Empowerment Dimensions and Organizational Role Stress(N = 120)
Variables MEANING COMPETENCE SELF
DETERMINATION IMPACT ORGANISATIONAL
ROLE STRESS MEANING 1 .671(**) .447(**) .687(**) -.277(**) COMPETENCE 1 .553(**) .552(**) -.524(**) SELF DETERMINATION 1 .527(**) -.344(**)
IMPACT 1 -.461(**) ORGANIZATIONAL ROLE STRESS 1
** Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed).
The results in Table 1 depict the kind as well as the level of relationship
between Empowerment dimensions and Organizational Role Stress. The
correlation values between them are negative and all of them have been
found to be significant. This indicates that empowerment level of the
employees help them to get into a productive process of controlling and
managing organizational role stress. To be more precise, competence,
meaning, impact and self determination help in managing their own role
stress in more intelligent ways. These findings support the findings of past
research. Earlier empirical works have also established a negative
relationship between empowerment and role stress (ambiguity and conflict).
The greater the perceived empowerment less the role stress. Two dimensions
of empowerment have been identified: (1) competence and (2) authority
(Chiles & Zorn, 1995; Conger & Kanungo, 1988; Spreitzer, 1995).
Employees that experience a work-specific sense of competence are more
likely to assume an active orientation with regard to their work and hence
will experience lower levels of role stress (Gist & Mitchell, 1992).
Table: 2 Impact of Empowerment on Organizational Role Stress (N = 120)
Predictors R R square ∆R² Beta t Sig.
COMPETENCE
.524 .274 .000 -.546 -5.431 .000
IMPACT
.563 .317 .043 -.419 -4.091 .000
MEANING .612 .375 .058 .377 3.268 .001
Table 2 reveals that when the independent variables entered in the regression
model with competence as a criterion, competence alone contributed 27.4%
of the variance. A significant increase of 4.3% was obtained in R square
when it was entered along with impact in the regression model accounting
for 31.7 % of variance. A significant increase of 5.8% was obtained in R
square when it was entered along with impact and meaning in the regression
model accounting for 37.5 % of the variance when entered in the regression
equation. It is clear from the table that competence makes the largest unique
contribution ( beta= -.546), followed by impact (beta = -.419) and meaning
(beta = .377).
The bank and insurance sector is a vibrant environment in which the
employees must handle more transactions that have increasing complexity,
with higher consumer expectations. In this environment, empowerment is
clearly seen as influencing role stress. That is, not having the power to
achieve solutions, solve problems, and answer questions is clearly stressful
as a “role issue.” At the same time empowerment competence— having the
training and skills to answer the questions, solve the problems, feeling in
control of anything that is and can be asked—feeds directly into job
satisfaction and does not affect role stress.
Implications
These results also suggest a number of managerial implications. First of all,
the empowerment seems to have a relatively strong impact in terms of role
stress reduction. One important implication seems to allow employees the
freedom to influence pace, working method, and sequence of tasks in
dealing with customers. While an increase in autonomy could be
implemented at the level of the individual employee, it has been shown that
increasing autonomy at work-group level by means of self-management
work teams significantly decreases employee role stress (Terra, 1995).
Developing empowerment autonomy could be done at three levels: (1)
strategic (i.e., general conditions of work, such as working hours, shift
systems), (2) process (i.e., change processes such as service quality
improvement by reducing response times), and (3) operational participation
(planning , scheduling, determining standards).
In stressful work environments, it has been emphasized that job rotation,
whereby employees switch jobs and learn about different duties and
responsibilities, and reinforcement of employees’ faith in their own
competencies and skills are particularly useful in increasing job satisfaction.
Employee recognition by management as well as strengthening employees’
confidence in their competence through task-related training programs may
be the key to keeping high-performance call center employees.
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